Geometric Amethyst and Silver Bracelet

Broad silver plaques, each canted slightly off its neighbor, march around the wrist, every one cut with a shallow concave edge that cradles a round amethyst cabochon. The band reads as small architecture worn at the wrist — flat geometric faces and deep purple domes, weight and interval doing the work where the Taxco school usually reached for flowers. It is the sculptural modernism that runs through Antonio Pineda's silver, here in a heavy, fully articulated form.

Set off-axis from one another, the plaques tilt the run of metal so it catches light along alternating planes, the amethysts riding high above and below the line. The forms are blunt and clean, built for the heavier mechanics of a hinged band: thick plaques joined by concealed hinges, the clasp folded into the links and held by a safety chain.

The bracelet is stamped SILVER BY TONO, the mark Pineda used around 1948 to 1953, with the inventory code ZZ242 — the ZZ prefix reserved for bracelets in the workshop's numbering, as recorded by Stromberg. Pineda worked the higher-grade silver favored on the Taxco zócalo, and the weight of these plaques is part of the design's intent. The stones are plain domed amethyst cabochons, each held flush in its canted silver plane.

The same discipline of single stones in tilted planes runs through the necklace it was made to match. Built around one repeated plaque, it is Pineda treating a bracelet as small sculpture: plane, light, and stone, and little it doesn't need.